Kurdish Suicide Bomber Kills 9 Turkish Soldiers

By STEPHEN KINZER

Published: July 3, 1996

ANKARA, Turkey, July 1—
On Friday, less than 48 hours after the head of Turkey's Islamic Party, Necmettin Erbakan, took office as Prime Minister, Kurdish rebels sent him a harsh message.

As Turkish soldiers were marching in a military parade through the eastern town of Tunceli, an apparently pregnant woman stepped from the crowd. She turned out to be carrying a bomb under her dress, and when it went off, she and nine soldiers were killed. More than 20 others were injured.

The attack reminded many Turks that regardless of which party holds power in Ankara, the war in the southeast remains the country's most intractable problem.

"This conflict is draining our resources, upsetting our development plans, polarizing our people and obstructing our relations with many countries," said a Turkish official who insisted on anonimity. "We have not been able to find a formula to resolve it. Until we do, we are not going to be able to take our next great steps forward as a nation."

Kurdish uprisings have been an almost permanent factor in Turkish life since the modern republic was founded three-quarters of a century ago.

In many ways, however, the current conflict, which began in 1984, is the most complex of all. It will pose a key challenge to Mr. Erbakan's new Government, as it has for his predecessors.

Guerrilla fighters from the Marxist-oriented Kurdistan Workers' Party, known as the P.K.K., enjoy the support of only a small minority of Turkey's 12 million Kurds. Their strength comes mainly from foreign sponsors, especially from Syria, Turkey's neighbor. Abdullah Ocalan, the P.K.K. leader, maintains a residence in Damascus, and his guerrillas are armed and sheltered by the Syrian Government.

Syria is evidently using the P.K.K. as an instrument to press Turkey to accept a series of political demands. The Syrian Government is angry about Turkey's diversion of water from the Euphrates River, which it says leaves too little to irrigate Syrian farms or sustain life in arid Syrian villages. It also wants Turkey to end its military cooperation agreement with Israel.

During his campaign last year, Mr. Erbakan suggested that he would like to improve relations with Syria. But even if his Government survives an upcoming confidence vote in Parliament, it is uncertain whether powerful military officers would tolerate an overture to the Syrian leader, Hafez al-Assad, or whether Mr. Assad could be persuaded to end his support for the P.K.K.

In a message to military commanders after Sunday's suicide bombing, Mr. Erbakan said, "I strongly condemn this abhorrent attack, and hope that Allah will show compassion to our martyrs."

The official Syrian newspaper Tishreen, however, suggested that relations between the two countries might soon improve.

"After the formation of the Turkish Government headed by Mr. Erbakan," the newspaper said in an editorial, "new hopes have risen for a real relaxation in Turkey's ties with neighboring countries, especially Syria."

The Turkish Government and the P.K.K. do have one thing in common, a dislike of Kurds who are working through the political process to win greater cultural autonomy but who renounce violence and oppose the idea of secession from Turkey.

The P.K.K. claims to be the sole representative of the Kurdish people, and views any group opposed to armed struggle as traitorous. The Government, for its part, considers even peaceful attempts to assert Kurdish identity as threats to national unity.

Last month, the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party held a convention in Ankara that dissolved in to chaos when masked militants pulled down the Turkish flag and replaced it with a Kurdish flag and a giant portrait of Mr. Ocalan. The police moved in, swinging their batons, and arrested 32 party leaders. Three other delegates to the convention were shot dead as they were driving home, and the party office in Izmir was damaged by a bomb explosion.

Party officials protested that the militants were provocateurs sent to discredit them. Television stations, however, repeatedly showed footage of the militants desecrating the Turkish flag, setting off a nationwide orgy of patriotic fervor and anti-Kurdish passion.

"In typical fashion, the reaction of Turkish officialdom, the state forces and the media, was exaggerated," wrote Rasit Gurdilek in the magazine Turkish Probe. "Turkey stands to lose from a repetition of the heavy-handed crackdown on the defense of Kurdish rights within the bounds of legality."

Turkey's image has been harmed, not only by its crackdown on Kurdish politicians, but also by persistent allegations of human rights abuses by army units fighting the P.K.K. Last month the European Parliament passed a resolution urging Turkey to "end its military operations in the southeast" and "open negotiations with all Kurdish organizations."

Previous Turkish governments have rejected such appeals, but Prime Minister Erbakan may try a different approach. He has often asserted that all Muslims, including Kurds, have a sacred obligation to live together in peace.

Thus far, however, there has been no hint that the P.K.K. will extend an olive branch to Mr. Erbakan, and episodes like Sunday's suicide bombing may only harden the army's resistance to a negotiated settlement.

In what may represent a widening of Turkey's war against the P.K.K., Turkish forces allegedly pursued guerrillas into Iran last week. Iran said they killed six Iranian civilians.

"This is not something we can ignore," said Iran's Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, "because it involves our national security and territorial integrity."